Sitting in her office, which curls like a cat's tail around a corner of the CBS newsroom, Katie Couric is doing her best to appear blasé, even though it's a mere five days before Diane Sawyer is scheduled to ascend to the anchor chair at rival network ABC.

Couric and Sawyer have been trying to get together for lunch, she says. "I think we like each other a lot," Couric says. True, she gamely participated in Sawyer's Good Morning America going-away video, in which ABC's chief investigative correspondent, Brian Ross, pretends to burst in on Couric — in this very office — making out with Sawyer's husband, director Mike Nichols. Couric insists she isn't taking their impending face-off too seriously. "I don't know whether it's that I've gotten older or more mature, but some of the brouhaha just seems so silly to me."

Couric will always have the distinction of being the first female solo anchor in the history of network news. Of course, network news is by definition stories relayed via visuals, and the portraits on the walls of Couric's office of trailblazing American women — Sally Ride, first in space; Wilma Rudolph, first to collect three Olympic golds in a single Games; Amelia Earhart, first to fly solo across the Atlantic — tell a story, too, elevating her own famous profile to a select pantheon.

Today, three weeks shy of 53, Couric looks tomboy terrific, that barely-made-up face betraying zero surgical workmanship, the fabled legs making those giant strides for women in black leather riding boots. She's been sitting here in her office, with its gentle lighting and creamy beauty-salon palette, answering e-mails and working up a 60 Minutes profile of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, trying to get Rahm and his brothers, Hollywood talent agent Ari and bioethicist Zeke, into the same room together, mix-mastering impossible schedules, herding egos.

The culture's come a long way, baby, what with two female solo anchors now presiding over America's three major network-news shows. Still, Couric recalls the scalding judgment of the New York Times media columnist "who basically said now that a woman has the job, it's obviously not as important." Of course, in recent years, the ratings of everybody's evening-news broadcasts have been melting like the polar ice caps. When Couric made her historic 2006 debut on CBS, the former Today-show star found herself hammered thin by critics who hated the experimental evening-news rethink. The sidewalk schadenfreudes resented her reported $15-million-a-year salary. She was deemed a lightweight, and though she's proved her smarts again and again, Couric admits she often dreams she's back at school "and I have a final exam and I forgot to drop the class and I'm forced to take an exam about things I know nothing about."

As a recurrent nightmare, it belies the competence that restored the public's confidence: that devastating 2008 interview of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, which some believe contributed to throwing the election to Barack Obama. Couric had danced with the governor of Alaska third, after Fox and ABC. "I don't know if you remember, but [ABC's Charlie Gibson] went up to Alaska and everything?" she asks.

No, we don't remember. Here's what we remember: Couric peeling Sarah Palin like a raw carrot on issues of foreign policy and the economy. "As for Katie Couric — where do I begin?" writes Palin in her best-selling memoir, Going Rogue, spending a full nine pages on a postgame analysis, charging "the perky one" (as she dismissed her on Oprah) with editing out her more substantive answers and asking her 12 times about her views on abortion and the morning-after pill.

"I think I probably had to re-ask because she wasn't as responsive as she needed to be," says Couric carefully, also denying she cocked her head with what Palin calls a "heavy dose of condescension" when she asked which newspapers and magazines Palin was in the habit of reading. "One day, I will talk about it at length," she says, rankled by the fact of the best seller's indictment but under obvious instruction not to go there.

She points to a photo on the wall of herself up to something important with General Ray Odierno in Iraq. "I look like a little peanut compared to him, don't I?" she asks. She looks like she's about 16 years old. It's the Tinker Bell nose. "I know," she says glumly. "That was a real detriment for me earlier in my career because I had a kind of young look. Those were the days."

She's still rocking a young look, thanks to tennis once a week, Spinning, yoga, Pilates. She's a little bored with Pilates, which she started up three years ago to help calm her back. Like most of American womanhood, she wouldn't mind if she were taller, with thinner thighs. She doesn't deny she believes in Botox: "I think if you want to do some tweaks here and there, there's nothing wrong with that." High-definition television has been kind to her, she says. "I think the fear factor of high def was overblown," she says, but adds, "I think God has a wonderful way of making your eyes start to go as your face does. I really can't see very well. Up close? Like in the mirror?" She giggles drily. "I always worry after I've done my makeup that I'm gonna look like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?"

Couric calls herself a joyful person. "I mean, hello? Yes. I am. I am! And unashamed that I'm not cynical or dark or ironic." She is sitting here drinking hot chocolate. She admits to being a several-season fan of Dancing with the Stars. Couric beams such approachability that she found herself a new best friend in the gate-crashing Salahis as they waited to go through the magnetometers at the Obamas' first state dinner in November.

Couric complimented Michaele Salahi's dramatic costume. Salahi said she'd picked it up in India. "Everybody was taking pictures with their BlackBerries. I don't know, I always thought that was poor form," Couric remembers. "But she was friendly and nice and cool. It wasn't for me to say, 'What's your connection? Why are you here?' Of course, now you think, wow."

Couric's own everyday closet reveals a bankerly rainbow of blacks and grays and pinstripes. Lots of MaxMara. "I always say it's very Faye Dunaway 'don't fuck with me, fellas!' from Mommie Dearest" (as opposed to sexy-lady Faye Dunaway from Network). Couric reaches for an apple-green blazer she wore only once. "This got ixnayed," she says. "Sometimes I feel like a little Barbie that people dress." The vox pop has made its preferences known: "With the job I have," says Couric, "it's much easier to pick apart what women are wearing, and I think the less ammo everybody has, the better." When she went short with the hair a year ago, she didn't ask permission. But the only place this violent-orange Oscar de la Renta shift is going is out to dinner — after the show.

Out comes a funky Narciso Rodriguez skirt, some kind of gabardine with a zip up the front. Or is it the back? The people whose opinions matter won't see it anyway under the desk. She bought it on sale. She is always careful to say that. The blue gown she wore to November's state dinner is Carmen Marc Valvo. "He's a colon-cancer survivor, so I feel a strong connection to him," she says.

It was almost 12 years ago that Couric's husband, attorney and NBC News legal analyst Jay Monahan, died of colon cancer. He was just 42. "He didn't get to see my daughter going to college and my younger daughter taking singing lessons," she says mournfully. Ellie, 18, is a Yale freshman; Carrie, 14, is at school in New York City and at that age when "sometimes they just don't want you in the same zip code. Don't you remember being 14? I used to make my parents drop me off blocks away from whatever location I was headed to. You see books at Barnes & Noble like How to Hug a Porcupine. You can't take it personally."

Couric, who's been seeing eco-preneur Brooks Perlin for the past three years, has said she'd like to marry again. "There are times, quite frankly, when as a single mom, you feel very alone," she says. "Ellie was sick after Thanksgiving with a virus and strep. She had a 105 fever, and it was really terrifying. I was running around looking for a thermometer in my building at 11:30 at night, and I was getting a fan, and my doctor said, 'You should put her in a tepid bath,' and she was all bundled up, and her temperature wasn't going down, and she was shaking because she was so cold." Her voice starts to crack. "In times like that, I just profoundly miss ..." She can't finish. Having a partner? "Yeah."

Perlin was 32 when they started dating, but Couric insists the 17-year age difference is not an issue. "Except for, um, you know, he's never been married and he doesn't have children," she offers cryptically. As for those who would label her a cougar, "I just find it stupid, you know? I think it also surmises that the older woman is always the pursuer. That's not necessarily true. I always say that maybe the older woman is the prey and someone else is the predator. It's just silly."

The riding boots uncross. Couric's got a meeting downstairs about the evening's broadcast. Again, the visuals tell a story: Amelia Earhart may be a personal hero, but the first female to fly solo on the network news has no intention of vanishing from the night sky anytime soon.

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